Monday

We all dream about that perfect search engine. The engine that gives you answer for every question without trying your ability to think of imaginary keywords that might or might not exist. The search engine that will tell you where your kids are and what they are doing, the search engine that tells who you need to marry, the search engine that tells you if are going to become the next president.

But wait, it will never happen.

There is a conflict of interest that arises in every advertising based business. Every content provider is serving a advertiser. They owe the advertiser a share of your attention.

If search engines became perfect, you will hardly click the ad. If search engine became perfect, you will not visit a website, the content owner will not have any reason to share his content with the search engine.

Marrissa mayer, gave a seminar in web.20 summit in which she shared how increasing the number of search results on each page from 10 to 30 caused the traffic and revenue to reduce 20%.

When marrisa mayer equates people leaving their search results page early and not clicking ads to bad performance you know there is not much hope.

The chances are a user might might have more search results to view, he focuses less on ads, he finds a good result in 30 results and visits the website.

Itsclearly understandable, irrespective of what google tells you, they want you on their website. That is where they get their revenues from.

I dont blame them, they are a for profit company. Its the entire business model that has conflict of interest built in.

Someday maybe they will start an ad free search engine and charge a fee for it. There they can give users the best search engine, because you are paying them for it. Simple.

Nokia whos brand slogan is connecting people, has so far not connected to the internet too much. They were happy making cool phones and selling them.

Nomore. Nokia has seen many companies come and play in its core domain. Every company that does anything at all has a phone to sell to us now.

But so far Nokia has focussed on its core. It made phone and only phones while others like Sonay and samsung ventured into anything that has a silicon chip inside it. And then along came Google android to give its recently acquired symbian mobile operating system a run for its money.

Everyone just wanted to take what bill gates did to the PC and do it to our mobile phones. Everyone wanted to control the third screen as they call it.

While Steve jobs is too arrogant to learn from his mistakes which is evident from the fact that he steal wanted people to buy a phone that has apples software, apples hardware and design, Google is actually doing what bill did by releasing a operating system and not making a mobile handset.

Now since Google would be shown a middle finger if it just came along with operating system and told everyone to switch over cause it says so, it follwed a better strategy of releasig this softare as open source which is less threatening to most handset manufacturers.

It seems nokia realises, with android becoming the default operating system it will be forced to offer its phones in android os too. More threat coming from other handset manufacturers.

Nokias new strategy is to save its market share by providing more internet based services. Services that are not easily portable creating a tall barrier to entry for other handset providers.

With its recent dozen acquisitions it seems nokia is thinking ahead of a lot of other handset manufacturers.

Obviously not everyone, Steve out thinks everyone, but then he wldnt sell anything to you that isnt apple made. Its so not steve. He makes his own screw when he build his house, he makes his own medicine when he gets a fever.

Acqusitions is for kids. Apple is differenent. If you want the apple, buy the whole tree you cheap skates.

Reuters reports one of the early executives of valueclick, an online adnetwork has joined a startup called gigya.

Gigya apparently lets application developers distribute their applications in their publisher network. It also lets advertisers advertise in these widgets and shares earnings in advertsing with publishers and developers.

Good business model. Distributed content is surely the next big thing on the internet.

I wonder if these recessive times will allow senior executives of more public cmpanies to take the plnge venture backed startups.

CEO Dan Hesse, whom you may remember from those classy black-and-white commercials on the teevee, recently told the National Press Club that as it stands, he doesn't think Android is "good enough to put the Sprint brand on it." Sure, he probably just meant that he'd like to see Android's kinks ironed out before Sprint puts out a handset of their own, since he has committed to support Google's OS in the future. It's a little surprising coming from Sprint, given their close ties with HTC, but once Android gets a little more polished, we're sure Sprint will jump into the fray. [via Reuters]

I firmly believe you cannot keep everyone happy. Its essential to make some people unhappy. Its important to pick the people you are goin make unhappy really well.

Facebook faced stiff opposition from around 1 million of its 100 million users to the site redesign. Facebook has gone ahead with the prposed redesign and it seems to be working well for now.

I like the new design.

I'm glad facebook went ahead with redesign. Listening too much to your users can lead to a painful collapse.

So many times what users say to you is based on illogical baseless factors that its best to logically decide what you want to do with a product. So any products have failed because they asked for solution from users.

Never ask a user for solution. Ask them what their problem is. Propose a solution. If you believe its best for the kind of users you want to keep, go ahead and do it.

Sometimes you just need to show them the middle finger, because the problem with us is that e really dont know what we want most times. We just want to be heard. Paid attention to. That doesnt mean i dont wnt the redesign, i just want you to know i have a point.

It seems all companies including Google, Yahoo and facebook understand one thing well now. They need to keep the developer community close to them to be able to create standards and be in a position to control the industry.

In its attempt facebook has released a framework they call thrift in the open source and followed up with releasing a service for thrift called scribe.

Both are aimed at developers who want to use various technologies to aggregate and display data from multiple servers. While thrift allows developers to run programs written under various languages like c, php and java, scribe lets developers aggregate data from many servers and process them. Scribe is a service that runs inside thrift.

Keeping open source developers is a good strategy. Demonstrated by microsoft and sun for many years. This is why Google chrome sucked for most firefox users. This is why opera isnt tht widely adopted dispite being a terrific browser. They havent been able to woo the developer community.

Firefox on the other hand is a developers best pal. In turn developers have given the firefox users some amazing applications that make their lives easier and more productive. Even though chrome is faster than firefox in both rendering visited page from sites and executing javascript, firefox users have not stopped using firefox.

Why? because firefox is not a browser. Its a platform.

It lets them pick from thousands of free firefox extensions that do a great job of making their lives easier. Like the firefox web developer plugin or the elasticfox extension to manage amazon web services.

Mahalo, a self proclaimed search engine has launched a program that will pay its users to browse their shit. The more shit you browse the more you get paid.

Interestingly this is not the first company to do this. Microsoft live is also bribing users to use its search engine. I doubt that works.

I used to feel web users are extremely finnicky customers, they act pricey(me including) and are disloyal by nature.

We would flock another site for the slightest of reasons. But my beliefs have changed since people havent changed their default search engines yet.

Infact i havent even tried microsoft live yet. I will never try Mahalo till it doesnt stop calling itself search engine.

But the point is, web users need quality too. If google promises they would better their search engine by twice as much in on year i bet me and all other users would pay a fee per year to use their search engine.

50$ per year? I am ok with it. Gimme a good search engine. Stop bribing me to browse through shit.

Tunecore a provider of online music distribution secured a funding of $7 million from opus capital. Tunecore has a simple busines model, music creators upload their music on tunecore, it charges them a fee to store thei music and retail it on many retailers around the web.

The business is so simple its almost delicious. I have no doubt this will work.

Yahoo finally gets it. Finally they understand that to stick around the internet, they need to work with the people who make it, the developers.

When i look back at yahoos history sometime its hard to believe theyw ere so close o hude opportunities and never noticed it. They had overture. They had the audience. They had the most popular IM. They had the most popular web mail. They had great people. They had money. They had advertisers. They had the technology. The had the infrastructure.

Well they still didn't get it.

Anyways, it seems some folks at yahoo do get it now.

They are opening up a lot to people. Though there is still a lot that can be done, if you are a US investor buy yahoo shares at the current prices.

It might get bought over or it might get to the top again whetever happens they do seem to have some smart loyal people there that will make sure the price per share goes up sooner or later.

Sunday

I have removed this post as some people might believe this to be based on facts. I thought it was obvious that its not. I'll just say sorry.I deeply apologise to anyone and authorities for inconvinience and possibly my immaturity. I encourage all bloggers to understand cyberlaws at their website.

Saturday

Once upon a time a read techcrunch, because they actually kept me in the know. I never commented, but i read it. Then the web grew up and i figured there is web outside of silicon valley, the web is in places where micheal arringtons will never report about because they have never heard of these places heck they have not heard of any place outside of palo alto.

Now when i visit them once in a while mostly courtesy techmeme. Its that friends promoting friends thing. that hope that if i send you traffic and you send me traffic, in the end maybe we can still get people to believe all the web is in silicon valley thing you know.

I still like techmeme, atleast they do silicon valley well. But in the recent past techcrunch is really trying hard to find something to write about. And then they make up stories that should be going on someones personal blog.

They recently reported about how google is using a competitors name to get traffic to its website and how it uses its own advertising platform to advertise itself.

So google is supposed to use someone elses advertising platform to promote its product and not its own because that somehow is unethical?

I tell you what is unethical, bad reporting is unethical, reporting for the sake of reporting is unethical.

Techcrunch, time for some self searching guys, maybe you can fire a people or two yourself. Why not firing is in, isnt it?

Google inc launched the new version of gmail for mobile. Sometimes its hard to believe we are trying this hard to please the consumers of free applications as developers.

There was a time when developers treated the free application market as a hobby something you do in your excess time and now we see the heavy weights fighting it out for the free applications. The free applications are as good or better than enterprise level applications.

So the only differentiation between a free application and an enterprise application is that a enterprise application comes with more fined tuned control for the enterprise while a free application is for a individual consumer.

Though something don't change much, years ago a company called gave operating system and software at throw away prices or free just to make it so part of a consumers life that it becomes a standard and then enterprises have no choice but to buy licenses for this application, a company called Google is dooing the same now.

Maybe this is ignorance or just the fact that naxalites are against the bad governance and not common people.

I am not a genius, but its easy to understand the greatest threat to the integrity of a country does not come from a few people unhappy with the government but it comes from the fact that masses are divided among themselves.

We all are unhappy with the government at some level, the difference between naxalites and a common man is that a naxalite take up arms and fight these politicians and police while we don't. I guess its easy to understand why.

The greatest threat to the integrity of India comes from the politics of division, of religion and region. I realise the two biggest parties themselves are fighting over religion.

But to start with i hope the two biggest parties of this country come together and kill regional politics sooner than later because if this is not done, there will be no nation, we will just have unUnited states of India.

We need a 180 degree shift in politics.

Another example of how regional politicians are of the lowest grade is when the congress was on the verge of extinction, people like Sharad Pawar and Sagma ran to Sonia gandhi to save it, when she saved it, they wanted to be the PM, when they couldnt be the PM, they just left the party.

Thats how small these regional politicians are. They have no ethics, no principle. Yet they are the richest politicians. Wake up Indians, you have been fooled long enough.

Arvind is a graduate of oxford university and a former Time megazine reporter. He is also the second youngest winner of bookers prize at the age of 33 after Ben Okri who won at the age of 32.

Michael Portillo, a former cabinet minister and the chairman of this year’s panel of judges, praised Mr. Adiga’s novel, saying that the short list had contained a series of “extraordinarily readable page-turners.” However, Mr. Adiga’s book had prevailed, he said, “because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure.”

Mr. Adiga said his book was an “attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India — the voice of the colossal underclass.”

The other authors that were shortlisted were Irish writer Sebastian Barry, 53, whose book “The Secret Scripture” is the story of an Irish patient in a mental hospital sharing her shocking family history with her psychiatrist, “Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh, “The Clothes on Their Backs” by Linda Grant, “The Northern Clemency” by Philip Hensher and “A Fraction of the Whole” by Steve Toltz.

According a kerry walterz a reviewer of Adiga's book on amazon.com,

The plot centers around Balram Halwai, a laborer born and raised in a small village utterly controlled by crooked and feudally powerful landlords. The village is located in 'the Darkness,' a particularly backward region of India. Balram is eventually taken to Delhi as a driver for one of the landlord's westernized sons, Ashok. It's in Delhi that Balram comes to the realization that there's a new caste system at work in both India and the world, and it has only two groups: those who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and predators. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in which this ambition plays out.

ICICI is closing down branches. HDFC and other institutions are seeing a decline in demand.

Malls are less crowded, airports are emptying. But the ones with jobs are still ok. There will be no 50% offs in most shops this festive season. And its money saving time anyways.

But the worst affected will be the new graduates of this year and the next when they come out with no jobs in sight.

Tough times ahead. Didn't someone say Indian economy is decoupled from US economy?

Updated News: Jet Airways takes back its fired employees. According to the chairman of the company Naresh Goyal, he has listened to his conscience, while the avitiation minister jumped into to take credit by saying he asked Goyal to take back sacked back employees.

It seems the truth is political pressure arising from the coverage of the sacking and the effect it will have on the salaried class and the upcomign elections.

Wednesday

Vellas, by the way are people who have too much time and not enough stuff to do. And like the word "guru" this should be included in the english language because there are so many of them.

Unlike most people who cannot seem to find enough time to do things that are really important to them, like read a book, meet an old friend, spend time with family, these people always have excess time. Lucky them.

Orkut.com recently wrote a blog post about this new feature where you can access your orkut.com service from IPhone and they called it "Orkut on IPhone: A Socialites dream come true". Sometime, or most times, i wonder how do people make time to scrap each other the whole day.

I have also seen people scraping each other when they could easily IM(both being online), or email, or call.

Sometimes i feel people use messaging on social networks in cases when they "sorta want to be in touch" but not "too much".

I mean hey i messaged you, once, on orkut, i like to stay in touch you know. Its like an excuse, a formality.

People who really care would much rather have a meeting, a call, an IM or email. And in that order.

This is one reason why marketeers do not want to reach masses on social networks, they don't want to reach out to this segment of consumers, they sorta, don't wanna be in touch with you much you know, but hey maybe they will scrap you. Just maybe.

In school, we were never taught how to deal with motivations. We were taught what motivation is but still we never took time out to understand it in its entirity, no one ever taught us what it is, where it comes from and what it can do for us. Or maybe they didn't know.

But than you grow up and see one motivation makes a terrorist out of a regular man, and another makes a Gandhi. There are countless other examples where individual motivations led ordinary people to become extraoridianry. Some extraordinary in a good way, others in not so good way.

Some became billionaire philanthropists who gave away their wealth to end world hunger, others blew up bombs under the pretext of saving their religion. One motivation led a women to leave her country and serve the poorest of the poor in a foreign land another led a man to invade a foreign land.

One motivation led the man to space, other led him to a plane that would crash and kill hundreds.

Yet we never worried about understanding motivation, for its just a word, for what happens is not because of motivations, its because of luck.

Our obsession with randomness has never let us really understand this amazing word motivation.

But its time, we rid our selves from the mistakes of our teachers. Spend some time understanding motivation, not just our own but everyone else around us and the guys in guantanamo bay and the missionaries and the mercinaries.

Try to understand your motivations today, while you are at this, try understanding how motivation is different from inspiration, aspiration and instigation, if it is.

Watch your motivation, because my friends, it can take you places. Literally.

Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and the creation of anegalitarian society.

So what am i refering to?

I am refering to the recent interventions from governments, especially the US government in the functioning of markets. The US government has recently announced a bailout package of $700 billions and previously bailed out freddie and fannie bank, merill lynch, AIG.

The point of this post is if companies are bailed out like this by governments that pride themselves as the keepers of capitalism, doesn't this bcome socialism of sorts?

USA has been pressurising, pleading, lobbying to get developing countries like India, China, Brazil and others to cut subsidies on various sectors, including oil, agriculture, banking sector. While these countries hold government control and regulations on ownership and investment in many sectors and themselves manage and run many sectors for example railways in China & India, USA and its representatives have always been unhappy with this stand.

India was about to lift up its foreign investment limit in the banking and insurance sector in 2009. And we should thank god that the current crisis has come to the forefront before that.

But things are a little different now. US goverment will buyout troubled assets of many banks and mortgage landers freeing them of bad assets and making available some cash. But 700$ Billions isn't that much, is it?

By the way while i was researching to find out how a economic bailout can help boost economy, i came across, keynesian theory.This theory was coined by British economist John Maynard Keynes in early twentieth century somewhere around the economic depression.

According to him, some people may have a liquidity preference which would see them rather hold money than buy new goods or services, which therefore raised the prospect that the Great Depression would not end without what he termed in the General Theory "a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment."

In other words, a goverment intervention is required to help a economy come out of a depression.

We don't know if this theory works or not, but we will soon find out. From what ever history i know, US came out of the last depression because of world war 2 when they got the chance to supply allied armies with military hardware.

So i am just hoping this theory will work out for them and we do not have to deal with the second option!.

Coming back to the topic, the US government is certainly acting like a socialist state. In a freemarket, true to capitalist principles, these troubles companies should be allowed to go bankrupt. Thats how a free market functions, surivive or die.

So do we all finally agree that its ok to be a little socialistic once in a while? George ?

Friday

Bah, 5 year old kids know it in this part of the world, they have been seeing George Bush long enough.

But seriously, western man still needs to struggle. For every western man, there are 11 indians, 22 chinese, 7 phillipinos, 2 pakistanis, 1 bangadeshi, 2 malaysians and 12 other random guys from random countries waiting to take his job and do it for half the cost or less.

Infact this very moment there will 10 Indians who are preparing to take the job of the scientist who did this study.

Monday

I have started to wonder lately if there are more getting things done blogs in the blogoverse(short for blog universe).

On last count Google blog search turned out 1,818,289 blog posts mentioning GTD, there is a whole bloody website by the name of GTDtimes that has many contributors writing on the same topic.

I mean isnt that getting a bit too much, if there was so much content to write about on this topic David Allen would have written 10 books by now. So what are these guys writing anyways?

Frankly it seemed to me they are all writing the same thing over and over and over again. I wish someone would tell them to stop. People are reading so much of this getting things done stuff, they dont get time to practise what they learn.

The popular blog style website that started writing about productivity online years ago and was probably the first ones to evanglise DavidAllens GTD method online has written about GTD and tools for long now.

There huge popularity has egged all other wannabes to think writing the stuff lifahacker writes about will get them popular. And then we end up with 1,818,289 blog posts and no readers. Its funny.

From what i could understand by reading Davids book is this

1. Take all incomplete tasks/ideas/actions outside your head and write them somewhere, anywhere paper or a word document or god frickin anywhere2. Plan on how to complete each one of them by wriitng down next actions and keep completing them3. Keep your bloody information documented so when you need them you can find them4. Dont be a egoistic dog and delegate when you cant do something

GTD bloggers, please stop, find a new topic to blog. If you have no topics, Read more books. Write less. Fine?

US & Russia both have landed on Moon previously in an attempt to outsmart each other and wasted bilions of tax payers money for no real gains. Though they did setup international space station, they did not do it on Moon, which led to the speculation that there are aliens on moon already.

Come to think of it, setting up a space station on moon, should be easier than having a space station that is orbiting like satellites right?

If China does infact setup space station on moon, will they proclaim the land on moon as theirs. Space tourism will be a great revenue maker in the time to come and surely China would want a pie out of that.

But this will be a problem for people who have already bought land on moon. Apparently there are companies that are letting people buy land on moon and even sending them certificates of ownership. Gimme a break. Actually i want to know what is the current real estate price there.

But China isn't alone. It takes more than one fool to have a race right. India is launching its own mission to space soon called chandrayaan. I know people would argue that this is a display of our technological innovation(or russias?) but i just have one thing to say. Feed all first. Still got an argument?

But this is nomore a country thing, the popular payment processing company papypal's former co founder, started a company called spaceX, which had its first successful run in space recently.

Everything is ok, i mean China wants land on moon, good, they need it. Actually we need it too. Its ironical, Canada has so much land, no people, India & China have so many people, no land.

I just hope they dont find lot of natural resources there, specially radioactive material. If they do, two things will happen.

1. Moon will be abused to get all its natural resources.2. Moon will becoming the dumping ground for radiactive waste.

And like we always do, we would not realise the implications of this on the enviorment till its too late.

But this is not the worse that could happen, i mean China loves cutting of access right? What if it cuts off our access to moon light?

I was listening to a oXygen tutorial here on youtube today and noticed the author was speaking in a very chinese accent(or japanese?)

Althrough i didnt understand much of it i enjoyed the accent a lot. if you havent yet taken a peep at the video, do it, its fun.

I prefer calling this accent chinglish(chinese+english). Its hilarious whenw e mix english with various accents. There is hinglish(hindi+english) which is in a league of its own. There is Inglish(Indian speaking english) which is what most Indians sound like in USA, which is again in a league of its own.

With so many verisons of english accent going around which literally make this language seem like a completely new language on its own, i wonder which accent is the most entertaining.

I wish there was a contest out there which lets net users vote for the best and most entertaining accent out there. It would be fun.

Till that time, i declare Chinglish as the best english accent out there, heck its a new language altogether better than english, china rocks.

Thursday

Recently i have been running a Google adwords campaign and saw some silly mistakes in my account. I am kind of sure, i am not the only one who has faced this issue, i am also sure Google would compensate for this.

So what happened here is this, i have bid a maximum of 0.04$ for a keyword. So ideally each click should cost me 0.04$, but Google has charged me anything from 0.04$ to 0.06$ for each keyword.

Its easy to understand by just looking under the Current Bid, Clicks, Avg. CPC, Cost columns for all keywords in the screeshot i am presenting below.The question is if i have bid 0.04$ for each click, and i have recieved 1 click, how can the cost of one click be 0.05$. Or am i getting my maths wrong?

I have uploaded a screenshot you can click to see in full screen below. Take a look at this screenshot here

The bigger question is that this is not a startup company who has just started operations and facing some operational glitches, there have been billions spent on Google adwords, most by folks who are not that analytical or tech savvy to look at the data Google provides in great detail. How many millions have passed through to Google this way?